RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Words matter,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters this week.
Regrettably Earnest was being less than earnest in failing to point out that words can also have several meanings – which can result in people failing to actually communicate with each other because each has a different understanding of the words he is using.

As a lawyer with extensive experience in drafting agreements – I have found the most critical part in any agreement is the definition of terms used in those agreements – so that the parties are in no doubt at all as to the meaning of the words they are using.

The so-called “Two State Solution” has gone nowhere in the last 20 years for precisely this reason.

The parties to the negotiations – including America on its own and as part of the Quartet – have been talking at cross purposes without first agreeing on the meaning of the terms they are using.

Welcome to Startup Egypt A new entrepreneurial culture is emerging from the turmoil of the Arab Spring.

Tahrir became the epicenter of the Arab Spring in 2011. Four years of revolution, counterrevolution and terror followed, and the iconic square at the heart of the Egyptian capital has the scars to show for it. Angry graffiti abounds. The air is tense. A vacant office building—its windows blown out, its facade blackened by fire—overlooks the square next to the equally depressing state antiquities museum.

Scratch beneath the surface, and you’ll find a different Cairo populated by tech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, new-media moguls and high-flying former émigrés who are now flocking home, attracted by the stable new climate and economic reforms initiated by the government of President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. Call it Startup Egypt.

Take Cloudpress, a cloud-based marketing platform that allows brands to create and easily share visual content with consumers. It was “acqui-hired” by News Corp. (which owns this newspaper’s parent company, Dow Jones) in 2014, a deal in which the investor picks up an existing company’s human talent.

China is building military bases on artificial islands hundreds of miles off its coast, in waters claimed by six other countries. These new fortresses in the South China Sea raise the risk of war, yet Washington seems to have no strategy to address them. Are the U.S. and its allies ceding the nearly 1.35 million square miles claimed by China without legal merit, including some of the busiest sea lanes on the planet?

Over the past year Chinese dredging and other landfill techniques have transformed tiny reefs into potential homes for military aircraft, ships, radar facilities and other assets. Formerly underwater during high tide, Johnson Reef is now a 25-acre landmass. Nearby Hughes Reef has grown big enough to host two piers and a cement plant. Gaven Reef is now 28 acres, with a helipad and antiaircraft tower. Fiery Cross Reef has grown 11-fold since August, with what appears to be a three-kilometer airstrip under construction. All are part of the Spratly islands, a cluster of rocks between the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam, often some 650 miles from China.

Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz took it in the neck from all sides for asking his baristas to chat up half-awake customers about race in America. Mr. Schultz, however, is merely one voice in the conversation on race, which since the Ferguson shooting and Selma’s 50th anniversary has settled on American politics like winter in the East, harsh and unending.

While much of it is predictable or discouraging, others are trying something really new—a positive point of view. We start with the discouraging words.

The nomination of Loretta Lynch, the black federal prosecutor from the Brooklyn district, has elicited comments about her delayed confirmation vote in the Senate.

Folks, this is what you get when you have the cojones to take a bold stand for liberty and conservatism. The hysteria, outrage, slings and arrows coming from both sides of the political aisle targeted at Cruz is what a true conservative must be willing to endure.

For crying out loud, Cruz simply trumpeted traditional principles and values that Americans have celebrated since the Republic’s founding; American Exceptionalism, liberty, freedom, hard work, God and country. The problem is without even realizing it, many have succumbed to the Left successfully tainting their thinking, lowering the nation’s behavioral bar and forcing political correctness down our throats. So when a Ted Cruz comes along, his message sounds edgy to those hearing it for the first time. And yet, I believe many will be drawn instinctively to it.

Governor Scott Walker, Wisconsin voters, and champions of clean elections won a crucial decision at the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday when the justices declined to hear a challenge to an appeals court’s decision upholding Wisconsin’s photo voter ID law.

While miffed by the Court’s action, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) crowed today (Tuesday) that state officials said the law still will not be in effect for the April 7 election.

The ACLU filed an emergency request on Monday asking for an extension of a stay of the law that had been granted before last November’s election. Within hours, state officials announced that the law would remain suspended because absentee ballots had already been sent out.

“For now, the voters of Wisconsin will be able to cast their ballots free from the burdens placed on them by this law,” said ACLU Voting Rights Project Director Dale Ho, in a press release. “But this should be the case for voters permanently, not just for one election. We are evaluating our next steps in the fight for the right of all Americans to vote free from unnecessary barriers.”

Remember when his father, a bearded gnome addressed his son in Arabic? It was subsequently revealed that in 2011, while his son was held by Taliban Bob Bergdahl made a personal video for the Pakistani government that he hoped would be delivered to his boy, Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.In the three-minute video, he mentioned several high-ranking Pakistani generals by name, thanking them for their sacrifices. rsk (http://www.idahostatesman.com/2014/06/08/3225056/bergdahls-father-now-under-scrutiny.html#storylink=cpy)

Obama wanted to ‘whittle away’ the killers at Guantanamo.

The United States Army intends to charge Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. That was Wednesday’s news, but the bigger story is the extravagant price the U.S. has paid because President Obama wanted to score political points.

Readers will recall that then-Private First Class Bergdahl went missing from his post in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan in June 2009. Fellow soldiers suspected desertion, though the Army conducted a risky manhunt to recover him. The sergeant was quickly captured by the Taliban and held for five years.

The Associated Press has reported that an internal Pentagon investigation in 2010 found “incontrovertible” evidence that he had walked away from his post. Journalists also uncovered an exchange of letters in which the soldier wrote to his father “the title of U.S. soldier is just the lie of fools,” that he was “ashamed to even be american,” and that “the future is too good to waste on lies.” Replied father Robert: “OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE!”

His new doctrine: Downgrade ties to Israel and the Saudis while letting Iran fill the vacuum left by U.S. retreat.

Let’s connect the dots.

Data point No. 1: President Obama withdrew U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011 and is preparing to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2016, even while keeping a few more troops there this year and next than originally planned.

Point No. 2: The Obama administration keeps largely silent about Iran’s power grab in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, even going so far now as to assist Iranian forces in Tikrit, while attempting to negotiate a nuclear deal with Tehran that would allow it to maintain thousands of centrifuges.

Point No. 3: Mr. Obama berates Benjamin Netanyahu for allegedly “racist” campaign rhetoric, refuses to accept his apologies, and says the U.S. may now “re-assess options,” code words for allowing the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state over Israeli objections.

The coalition that placed Obama in the White House is cemented by what author Joel Kotkin amusingly calls “the clerisy”: the secular priesthood of America’s “progressive” elite, which feathers its nest at the expense of the alliance’s other constituency, the poor.

In case you suffer from the delusion that America’s Democratic Party is the party of equality, Joel Kotkin, in The New Class Conflict, is here to tell you otherwise. Kotkin is a master of revealing statistics, and his book is a short, sharp, inspired diagnosis of what ails America today. It is a damning portrait of a society in awe of smug sanctimonious self-serving Left-liberal elites. These elites use reformist rhetoric and guilt tactics to engineer upward mobility for themselves and downward mobility for the American middle class. Kotkin observes that 95 per cent of the income gains during President Obama’s first term went to 1 per cent of the population. In the 2012 elections, Obama triumphed in eight of the country’s ten wealthiest counties, sometimes by margins of two-to-one. In the first term of his presidency, average annual US household income dropped by $2600 and the number in poverty grew by six million.

Nothing better illustrates the triumph of propaganda over fact than the confected narrative, beloved of Islamists and leftists, which asserts the battles of 900 years ago were imperialist assaults on peaceful and blameless Muslims. They were nothing of the kind.

Soaked in petrol and trapped in a cage, the captured Jordanian pilot watched as the ISIS Islamo-fascist thugs prepared to burn him alive. What were his thoughts in those final moments as they conducted their despicable ceremony and he confronted the horrific fate that was about to engulf him?

Don’t ask President Barack Obama. He didn’t appear particularly concerned at the images of the pilot’s appalling death agony – complete with close-ups – that climax the long, professionally produced video posted on YouTube by ISIS to promote their cause. Indeed, when Obama chose to speak publicly about this abhorrent act, he brushed it aside. Speaking at a National Prayer Breakfast, he indulged in a characteristic exercise of moral relativism, insisting that “lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades … people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ”.